US to work with India to crackdown on pirated movies, API

Lalit K Jha
Washington, Jan 14 (PTI) The US will work closely with
India to intensify its crackdown on the pirated Bollywood
movies and counterfeit pharmaceuticals, a top official has
said.
Observing that both the pirated Bollywood movies and
the counterfeit pharmaceuticals have been causing huge
financial losses, Matthew King, Deputy Director Homeland
Security Investigations, National Intellectual Property Rights
(IPR) Co-ordination Center, told foreign journalists that such
a crackdown would intensify in 2011.
"We do a lot with counterfeit pharma and the active
pharmaceutical ingredients (API) coming out of India. We have
a very good relationship with Indian authorities, trying to
work collaboratively on some of the issues, not only the
Bollywood films and the content but also on API," King said.
"Realise that if you're talking about API, the
pharmaceuticals, and you're talking bulk, you're not sending
that through the mail facilities. You're using containers.
"And that's where our expertise with customs authorities,
police authorities -- if you move a container, there has to be
paperwork. And it's much easier to track than, say, a
first-release Bollywood film that immediately is out on the
Internet," he noted.
"When you look at the level of sophistication of how
people are grabbing these films, you no longer see a hand-held
camera with people walking in front of the movie screen. I
mean, these are really first-rate to include 3-D sound, every
language, immediately, and it's out there before the release
in India or the release in the US of our films," King said
observing that this is a bit complicated.
In November,the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement
(ICE) had launched operation 'In Our Sites' to target pirated
internet movies and grabbed as many as 82 domain names of
commercial websites engaged in the illegal sale and
distribution of counterfeit goods and copyrighted works.
"I think in 2011 going forward, one of the things we'd
really like to explore with the Indian authorities and with
all of our partners is if we're doing an operation like 'In
Our Sites', going after the Internet, would the Indian
authorities like to work with us on an operation? Maybe they
know a few sites and we could go after them collaboratively,
obviously within the purview of our law and to the extent that
we can," King said.
On the movies, King said the US Government is also
collaborating with the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of
America).
"They are very aggressive in looking for their clients
on where these are being downloaded from -- great in-house
investigative departments, and they work with us
collaboratively to help identify the sites. So we did that,"
he said. PTI LKJ
HMI


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